Needlenose

For the last two years I’ve been begging the Dem majority leadership in the Senate to use every tool to smackdown the vile Repugs.  It looks like Harry Reid or somebody in the leadership has finally grown a pair and is playing hardball!  I’d like to see more of this!  Somebody should fly former California legislative leader Willie Brown in do D.C. to run a series of seminars on how to partisan smackdowns!

I never bought the whole ‘bipartisanship’ BS – after all, most of the Repugs are holdovers from the ‘date rape’ bipartisanship of the 4 years prior.  However, by the same token, this new WWF spirit needs to be tempered with actual change in the way Congress does other business.  In other words, we need to see an end to the corrupting special interest lobbying, pork barrel politics and earmarks buried in other legislation.   Otherwise, we’ve just substituted one set of venal pigs for another.

As of this writing the Democrats have a clear 54-seat majority in the Senate with 4 seats as-yet undecided (and two sorta independents). There has been a lot of talk about the fillibuster-proof 60 seat magic number, but this ignores the fact that reaching sixty (and not, say, 61) means that a single Democratic senator can wield an awful lot of power over all others, merely by threatening not to show up to break a fillibuster.

So be careful what you wish for.

The four elections still in question are Alaska, Georgia, Minnesota, and Oregon. In Alaska, Ted Stevens may very well be forced to resign even if he does win so the whole thing will go to a special election. Georgia may end up going to a runoff vote, and Oregon and Minnesota will probably have to go through a recount. In the unlikely scenario that the Dems end up taking all these four, they’ll still be short two votes.

Vermont’s Bernie Sanders is technically an independent, but in reality, he’s even farther to the left than most Democrats, so you can effectively put him in the Dem column. So that’s 59. The pivotal 60th vote, once again, would then go to — you ready for it — Joe Lieberman.

So be careful what you wish for.

Somewhere along the night, it looks like Senate leadership looked at the tea-leaves and decided given where those four races stood, that the chances of reaching 60 are slim. So it’s with great delight that we read this morning that Harry Reid is going to meet with Lieberman this week — hopefully to drop-kick him out of the Democratic Caucus and relegate him to the scrap-heap of backbench irrelevancy where he belongs.

Given that returning GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell was responsible for so much of the fillibuster action this last session and that many of the GOP seats lost were moderates, we can expect a great deal of legislative gridlock.

No big surprises there. But at least, we won’t be seeing the whole Senate being held hostage again by a single petulant (Lieberman) back-stabbing (Lieberman) self-involved (Lieberman) Senator, which is a Good Thing.